Everyone loves Bryson Graham, but can he make the NBA respect the Bulls again?

Posted May 06, 2026 7:59 pm

By Jon Greenberg

It didn’t take long for Michael Reinsdorf to realize that Bryson Graham was his guy.

“Two minutes,” he said.

The night before the official interview, Reinsdorf, the Chicago Bulls’ president/CEO, and Graham sat down for dinner at Erie Cafe, a classic Chicago steakhouse, and Reinsdorf just had a feeling that this was his next executive vice president of basketball operations.

“I’m like, ‘Wow,’” he said of that first impression. “I just knew right away.”

Apparently, this is not an unusual situation in Graham’s basketball life.

When Mark Turgeon took over Texas A&M’s program, he realized Graham, who suffered two ACL tears in college, was more than a guy who could clap on the bench.

“He was very mature,” he said. “You had different conversations with Bryson than you did with other players on the team.”

After Monty Williams, then the young new coach of the New Orleans Hornets, got to know Graham, an intern who was responsible for unpacking boxes, picking up lunch and even cleaning toilets for the low-budget organization, he knew he was a keeper. He didn’t have a spot on his coaching staff, so he made Graham his video guy, despite his having no video experience.

“I just wanted him around,” Williams said.

Nine years later, when David Griffin got the top basketball job in New Orleans, one name kept coming up during his information-gathering process about the staff he inherited: Bryson Graham. You’re going to want to meet this guy, he was told.

Griffin quickly figured out the hype was real.

“I was so awed by him that I made sure to promote him and keep him in the fold,” he said, “and I brought him as close to me as I could from the very beginning.”

After Reinsdorf talked for about eight minutes to start Wednesday’s introductory news conference, he finally introduced the guy sitting next to him. Graham held the microphone on the table and said, “I think that’s my cue to take it from here.”

The kids call that “aura.”

Graham then got vulnerable and said he cried when Reinsdorf offered him the job. When the news became public Monday, Williams said he felt like one of his sons just got drafted.

“I don’t think I’ve been that happy for anybody getting a job in the NBA,” he said.

Williams, Griffin and Turgeon all told me there is something different about Graham. It wasn’t hard to see what they were talking about.

“He’s the kind of person that will come in and people are just going to gravitate towards him,” Williams said.

“I worked in the NBA for 32 years, and I’ve never been with anyone like him,” Griffin said.

Somehow, Graham managed to climb the NBA ladder without making any enemies in the process.

“He’s got a special gift that way,” Griffin said. “He’s about the work, and people love him for it.”

To those who hadn’t yet met him, Graham was a bit of a surprise to get the job. Former Bulls executive and current Timberwolves general manager Matt Lloyd was the public favorite, but the 39-year-old Graham’s mix of personality and experience sold him to Reinsdorf and makes him an intriguing — and maybe even hopeful — choice to run a listless organization living in the past.

With his personality, winning the job was relatively easy. But getting to this point was not. His playing career didn’t go as he expected — he started one game in college because a bunch of players were late to a team meeting — and he stuck around Texas A&M as a grad assistant.

Turgeon knew he wanted to work in the NBA, so he had him show around Spurs executive Dell Demps and his son, Tre, who was a budding recruit. It was Demps who then hired away Graham when he got the GM job in New Orleans in 2010.

Like most sports executives, Graham worked his way up from the bottom, learning how the league works along the way. Both Williams and Griffin told me Graham isn’t afraid of dissent, and, for as nice as he is, he can get tough.

“Everyone loved him,” Williams said. “But it wasn’t just because he was spitting pie in the sky all the time. Bryson would tell you the truth, but he does it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you got crapped on by a thousand pigeons. He does it in a way that makes you feel like you can do it better the next time. And that’s a gift.”

So when asked about the state of the team, Graham didn’t sugarcoat his answer.

“We are in the rebuilding phase, and we’re extremely young too,” Graham said. “So that’s how I define what a rebuilding team looks like. And I think that’s where we are right now. I’m not gonna be up here and mince words and say like, ‘We’re further along, if we just add a couple of pieces,’ because that’s not the case.”

Graham doesn’t need to do much of a deep dive to realize he doesn’t have a lot of difference-makers on this roster. No one is untradeable in the NBA, and there are no sacred cows on this roster, just a bunch of Bulls.

Chicago has the ninth-best odds in the draft lottery, which takes place here Sunday. The Bulls also own the No. 15 pick, courtesy of a prior trade.

Graham’s predecessor, Artūras Karnišovas, started his six-year run by drafting Patrick Williams fourth overall in 2020. Regardless of where the lottery balls land, Graham will need to do much better at the start. The good news is he’s got experience in this realm.

In his previous two seasons, Graham served as the GM in New Orleans and the senior vice president of basketball operations in Atlanta. But ever since he started his climb up from the video room, his specialty was player evaluation.

They all say that, of course. But while Graham has never run an organization before, he did have real responsibilities in New Orleans. Likewise, for his one year in Atlanta, where he’s credited for helping the Hawks embarrass his old team in a lopsided trade that could land them a top pick this year.

Griffin said Graham ran his draft room, even when Trajan Langdon was the GM. The Bulls’ press release announcing his hire didn’t mention Anthony Davis, who was drafted when Graham was still doing video work, and it also didn’t mention Zion Williamson, the No. 1 pick in 2019.

It did mention Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Dyson Daniels, Herb Jones, Trey Murphy III, Naji Marshall and Jose Alvarado. Of that group, only Daniels was a lottery pick. The rest ranged from the middle of the first round to undrafted.

When the Pelicans were working on an extension for Brandon Ingram, who wound up getting traded two seasons ago, Griffin told reporters that Graham had “drafted so well, it’s made it so you can’t keep them all necessarily at the level they want.”

Whether you’re a rich team or a poor one, you build on the margins. Lottery luck is also nice, but if Graham can find difference-makers there, he has a chance. There’s a reason Griffin wouldn’t let him leave. He turned down more than a half-dozen requests for Graham to interview with other teams — always talking it over with him — and eventually promoted him to GM.

“Over a six-year period, by several different metrics, Bryson’s had the best draft record in the NBA,” Griffin told me in a phone conversation. “The return on those guys versus expected value has been remarkable.”

Graham said his evaluation abilities started in the film room with Williams and grew from there. He hit the road as a scout and worked his way up the ladder. Under Griffin, the Pelicans had a modern analytics department, but there’s still a gut factor in judging talent.

“So much of it is also your intuition, you know?” Graham said.

“He’s one of those rare people that has a feel for that stuff,” Williams said.

Behind the scenes, “feel” is one of the most commonly used words in sports, and there are plenty of people working in this industry, from reporters to top executives, who lack it. If Graham has that elusive quality, it’s very good news for the Bulls and their beleaguered fans. Because he has a lot of decisions to make that will determine future success.

He has to fill out a staff, hire a head coach and start the process of turning the Bulls from a pretender into a contender. Reinsdorf said he didn’t hire him to take marching orders from the top, either. Jerry’s son realizes what they’ve been doing hasn’t worked.

“We need the Bulls to be relevant again,” he said.

Graham’s personality aside, the pick was a little curious because he spent most of his career in a small market that won only intermittently during his time there. It’s a big step up to work in Chicago, where the Bulls still sell out every game and coast on the legacy of Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Fans here have expectations. The pressure locally is no joke. The lingering question in the NBA: When will the Bulls start acting like a big-market, tax-paying behemoth?

Fans might not like the answer, which is something like: “Not yet. But maybe soon?”

“If we’re competing for championships, we expect that we’ll probably be in the luxury tax and totally OK with that,” Reinsdorf said. “I don’t want to be in the luxury tax for a team that’s not in the playoffs.”

The Bulls have spent plenty of bad money on players over the years, but they need to focus on building out the infrastructure of the front office. Reinsdorf said Graham will have full autonomy on that. We’ll see.

The state of the Bulls is such that a reporter asked Graham if Reinsdorf had to sell him on the job. And no, that wasn’t the case. There are only 30 of these jobs, for one, and while they haven’t always acted like it, the Bulls still have cachet.

Graham, who turns 40 this fall, said he was a young Michael Jordan fan in late-’90s San Antonio. He’s practically pinching himself that he’s the guy in charge in the House that Michael Built.

“I think of the greatness that’s in this building and what’s in these rafters and the championships that have been won here — it’s amazing,” he said. “It impacted my life more than I thought I knew because I was always chasing what this organization represented.”

The Bulls, too, have been chasing what this organization used to represent. It’s time to catch up.

Anyone who knows him says Graham is the man for a very tough job. Now he just has to go out there and prove it.

“We’re going to pull our sleeves up. We’re going to get to work, and we’re going to get out the mud,” Graham said. “And I’m not afraid of the work.”